When I was a boy there was an old, tall, craggy-faced priest from Scotland who used to preach on Sundays at the parish church in Tunapuna in Trinidad. I enjoyed his sermons. They were loud with thunder and denunciation and terrible warnings. I remember he was particularly strong on Hell.
This was a place of eternal fire and raging torment, described by him in vivid and frightening detail. He used no soft soap. Eternal damnation meant just that – a man was cursed and tortured forever for the sins he had committed.
What, I wonder, has happened to that sort of Hell? What has happened to Milton’s molten gulfs and fiery chasms? What has happened to Dante’s steep descending Inferno of lost-forever souls? Does anyone preach any more a full-blooded sermon on eternal punishment?
Until not so long ago the fearsome doctrine of everlasting damnation for those who failed the test at the Day of Judgement resounded in all the pulpits of Christendom and provided an urgent force in Christian missions. After all, there are no less than 8 passages in the Gospels, 7 in the Epistles, and 4 in the Book of Revelations that give scriptural warrant for punishment after this life which is both tormenting and permanent.
The Church used to relish the concept of a really hellish Hell. Tertullian, the great 3rd century Christian apologist, assured his fellow Christians who were then being persecuted that they could look forward to the prospect of watching from a heavenly vantage point the much more terrible tortures that would be inflicted on their present persecutors when they in due course were sent to Hell.
And even Sir Thomas More, who is now depicted as a model sort of liberal Christian gentleman, had no hesitation in justifying the burning of heretics on the grounds that pain suffered at the stake was only a very mild preliminary to the far worse suffering in the hereafter.
But in recent times the doctrine of hellfire seems to have been quietly dropped. I don’t suppose it has actually been repudiated, but it simply isn’t mentioned very much any more. I get the impression that Hell has become a source of embarrassment in religious circles.
It is as if it would be disreputable for us to worship a Creator able and willing to inflict unimaginable cruelties for all eternity on so much of mankind. Heaven is still OK, but hell is definitely out of fashion.
Perhaps it is that lately on earth itself men themselves have created such hells, and have been so shocked and terrified by the actuality, that they are reluctant any longer to believe that such conditions could ever be inflicted forever by a merciful God on even those souls most undeserving of any pity. Men have seen the hells of the Nazi concentration camps, the hells of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the hells of Stalin’s Gulag, the hells of Rwanda and Syria, the new and utterly brutal hells of the caliphate of IS and they have quietly said to themselves no, no, this must be temporary, this must be a devil’s aberration, there cannot be anything like this which lasts forever by God’s will.
And so the Hell we used to be taught to fear has now faded away. The religious experts more and more play it down, interpret it away, and explain that really the God of Vengeance is not that vengeful after all and of course the Hell of the Old Testament is not to be taken literally by all good up-to-date Christians.
Yet sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I think that the Hell the old parish priest in Tunapuna described in his sermons long ago really should lie in store to avenge the evil some men do. Consider the barbarous work of death squads in a dozen benighted countries around the world.
And what is one to think when contemplating some particularly inhuman murder involving perhaps the merciless killing of a young child with all the glory of life cut short?
To repay ultimate evil there is, perhaps, a case for Hell – and not a mild, sanitized, comfortable sort of hell, as preached by our modern theologians, but a Hell of old-fashioned, torturing fire that will last forever and after that forever again until God has counted, very slowly, all the grains of dust in all his universes and even then will not forgive.
